“It is extremely difficult to believe that there is anybody there,” murmured Mrs. Travers.

“Did you see them both, Jorgenson?” asked Lingard.

“Made out nobody.  Too far.  Too dark.”

As a matter of fact Jorgenson had seen nothing, about an hour before daybreak, but the distant glare of torches while the loud shouts of an excited multitude had reached him across the water only like a faint and tempestuous murmur.  Presently the lights went away processionally through the groves of trees into the armed stockades.  The distant glare vanished in the fading darkness and the murmurs of the invisible crowd ceased suddenly as if carried off by the retreating shadow of the night.  Daylight followed swiftly, disclosing to the sleepless Jorgenson the solitude of the shore and the ghostly outlines of the familiar forms of grouped trees and scattered human habitations.  He had watched the varied colours come out in the dawn, the wide cultivated Settlement of many shades of green, framed far away by the fine black lines of the forest-edge that was its limit and its protection.

Mrs. Travers stood against the rail as motionless as a statue.  Her face had lost all its mobility and her cheeks were dead white as if all the blood in her body had flowed back into her heart and had remained there.  Her very lips had lost their colour.  Lingard caught hold of her arm roughly.

“Don’t, Mrs. Travers.  Why are you terrifying yourself like this?  If you don’t believe what I say listen to me asking Jorgenson. . . .”

“Yes, ask me,” mumbled Jorgenson in his white moustache.

“Speak straight, Jorgenson.  What do you think?  Are the gentlemen alive?”

“Certainly,” said Jorgenson in a sort of disappointed tone as though he had expected a much more difficult question.

“Is their life in immediate danger?”

“Of course not,” said Jorgenson.

Lingard turned away from the oracle.  “You have heard him, Mrs. Travers.  You may believe every word he says.  There isn’t a thought or a purpose in that Settlement,” he continued, pointing at the dumb solitude of the lagoon, “that this man doesn’t know as if they were his own.”

“I know.  Ask me,” muttered Jorgenson, mechanically.

Mrs. Travers said nothing but made a slight movement and her whole rigid figure swayed dangerously.  Lingard put his arm firmly round her waist and she did not seem aware of it till after she had turned her head and found Lingard’s face very near her own.  But his eyes full of concern looked so close into hers that she was obliged to shut them like a woman about to faint.

The effect this produced upon Lingard was such that she felt the tightening of his arm and as she opened her eyes again some of the colour returned to her face.  She met the deepened expression of his solicitude with a look so steady, with a gaze that in spite of herself was so profoundly vivid that its clearness seemed to Lingard to throw all his past life into shade.—­“I don’t feel faint.  It isn’t that at all,” she declared in a perfectly calm voice.  It seemed to Lingard as cold as ice.